What is your E-business Quotient?

Internet marketing programs to score a high
EQ (E-business Quotient)

As a company you work and slave to get your web site up and running. Then you wait for the deluge of users to come your way. But . . . as the days and weeks progress . . . it dawns on you – you built it and they didn’t come. What did you do wrong?

Building your Internet presence, your web site, is the first step to staking your claim to a loyal following of happy visitors and hopefully paying customers.

What’s needed is a coordinated plan of e-business programs that, taken together, builds a substantial base of people who regularly frequent your site and buy your products and/or services.

This coordinated Internet marketing plan includes email marketing, pay-per-click search engine marketing, search engine optimization and a few other off-line tried-and-true marketing activities such as direct mail and even a very targeted program of publication advertising. But of course, it all starts with a well-designed web site with periodically updated well-written content useful to your target market.

Taken as a whole this adds up to what I like to call your E-business Quotient™ (EQ). Your mix of these activities will always be different depending on what product or service you sell. But a mix is definitely required. If done only piece-meal the EQ will always be lower, because none of these activities is a single silver-bullet to success.

Email Marketing

Each activity works from a marketing principal that is key to your business’ success. Email marketing, for example, is a very effective tool to stay in front of customers and prospects on a consistent and economical basis. We’re not talking about spam here. Effective email marketing is based on the best practices developed by the direct mail industry: It always starts with a good list.

You need to build a list of people who have agreed to permit you to send them useful information about your company and your industry. This is what’s called having an “opt-in” email list. Done consistently, email marketing in an “ Ezine” format is a great way to stay in front of customers and prospects with you company and product message.

Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flicker. Used correctly all these social media websites can help you to attract a flow of new and interested group of prospects to your web site. Knowing how to interact with the community of users that frequent these sites will determine you success or failure in social media.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click search marketing is a very good tool to quickly market to a very focused group via the search engines. Pay-per-click works on a bid process for keyword ranking in the sponsor section of search results. You pick the headline and message with a click-able link to your site. There is a whole industry built around pay-per-click. If done well, pay-per-click can be a great tool for getting targeted prospects to you site.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is sort of the flip side of pay-per-click. You try to optimize your site content for specific keyword phrases with the text content on your site. SEO is the long-term strategy for getting traffic from the search engines. Also, if done well SEO can be a great tool to build traffic to your site.

Direct Mail and Print Advertising

And lastly off-line activities you ignore at your peril are direct mail and a very targeted print advertising campaign. These two activities can work hand-in-hand by using the same creative for both and getting your list for the direct mail from the publications you advertise in.